Installing programs in linux!

[Andersfunk]

When I open my hotmail it keeps telling me to upgrade my firefox browser and it gives me a link to a download.
I've downloaded the file. But I can't seem to install it. The file is called firefox-3.0.1.tar.bz2, and it contains a bunch of files, but how do I install the program. I've tried opening some of the files, but I can't figure it out.

Help please!

[daark.child]

What version of Firefox are you currently running? For the file you downloaded, there is no need to install anything. Click on the file labeled "firefox" and the application should run.

[Andersfunk]

When I open the firefox file it opens in Xarchiver, but nothing else happens, except I see a bunch of files.

[daark.child]

You need to extract the contents of the tarball, navigate to where you placed the extracted directory and click on the icon labelled "firefox".

[L4Linux]

Which distribution are you using? Have you updated your system?
Check this link in Distrowatch for the complete list of update commands, depending on your distro.
I use Ubuntu 8.04 and it has firefox 3.0.1.

[devils casper]

You should install updates through default Package manager only. Which distro are you using?

[Andersfunk]

You should install updates through default Package manager only. Which distro are you using?

How do I find out which distro I'm using?!

And where do I find the Package manager?

[coopstah13]

open a terminal and post output of command

cat /etc/lsb-release

[i92guboj]

Depending on the distro there might be some ways. Some distros display a graphical boot decoration, maybe with the logo or the name of the distro somewhere. Maybe you can see it on the boot menu as well.

Some of them store version information on some plain text file on /etc/, but that's distro dependant, and that file might not be there at all.

Some distros patch their own kernels, so looking at the output of uname -a sometimes help.

The package manager should be accessible via a graphical frontend as well somewhere on the configuration menus.

You should never just uncompress a file and throw its contents randomly on your file system, because then bad things can happen, and your system will gradually rot to death, requiring a reinstall to fix odd things.

[devils casper]

Execute these :

cat /etc/*release*
cat /etc/*version*

Post output here.